Man Booker Challenge

  • Pandemic Potpourri

    These are the beautiful hand made masks, sent to us by some good friends, for when we go to the grocery store and so on. I cannot sew, and have no idea how to follow a pattern, and don’t have (and have never used) a sewing machine. And I’m the one Ted and Maya come to when they need a button sewn on or something, so of course this task was a lot more than I could handle. Aren’t they lovely? I like how the patterns are all different so we can tell which belongs to who, and that they are hand made by friends. How are you all doing?…

  • The Gathering

    Two years ago, I had a letter from Earnest.  He was writing to tell me that he was leaving the priesthood, though he had decided to stay with his little school in the high mountains….’I have no place left to live but in my own heart,’ he wrote, meaning he would conduct his life as before, but on privately different terms. And I thought this was the stupidest stuff I had ever heard until, sitting on a stool in the Shelbourne bar, I wondered what might happen if I just carried on as usual, told  no one, changed nothing, and decided not to be married after all. And I wondered…

  • Possession: A Romance

    Maud shivered, as she always shivered, on reading this document.  What had Christabel thought, when she read it?  Where had Christabel been, and why had she gone, and where had Randolph Ash been, between July 1859 and the summer of 1860?  There was no record, Roland said, of Ash not being at home.  He had published nothing during 1860 and had written few letters – those there were, were dated from Bloomsbury, as usual.  LaMotte scholars had never found any satisfactory explanation for Christabel’s apparent absence at the time of Blanche’s death, and had worked on the supposition of a quarrel between the two women.  This quarrel now looked quite…

  • Purple Hibiscus

    Kambili is a 15 year old girl, growing up in Nigeria with her older brother, Jaja, and their parents, Eugene and Beatrice. Eugene is a very wealthy, influential man, one of the few who dares to stand up and tell the truth about the local government by means of the newspaper he owns. Theirs is a charmed life, with Eugene donating richly to the poorer neighbors, to the church, and to the many charities he supports. They live in a compound surrounded by high walls, and they have servants to cook and clean and drive for them. They have cable television and luxurious cars, plenty of meat to eat, and…

  • The Amber Spyglass

    Into this wilde Abyss, The Womb of nature and perhaps her Grave, Of neither Sea, nor Shore, nor Air, nor Fire, But all these in their pregnant causes mixt Confus’dly, and which thus must ever fight, Unless th’ Almighty Maker them ordain His dark materials to create more Worlds, Into this wilde Abyss the warie fiend Stood on the brink of Hell and look’d a while, Pondering his Voyage; for no narrow frith He had to cross. ~Milton’s Paradise Lost The Amber Spyglass is the third book in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. It continues the story of Lyra and Will, two young adolescents with extraordinary powers. Lyra’s power…

  • Atonement

    I thought I would publish this book review, which I wrote over a week ago but was waiting until after the weekend to post, and then things changed in my world and I forgot about it. But it’s been sitting there, waiting patiently, and it gets the pity party off of the top of my page. Can’t spend too much time feeling sorry for myself, can I? No. So, here’s a book review from last week. I’m writing this review a bit differently than I have in the past, in that I’m not quite half-way through the book, and I’ve got a lot of thoughts swimming around in my head…

  • The Inheritance of Loss

    I finally finished The Inheritance of Loss, by Kiran Desai. I was so looking forward to reading this book, as I had heard nothing but good things about it. I even asked a woman on BART if she were enjoying, as she was reading it while on the way into the city, and she said that she was engrossed, and couldn’t pull herself away. I started this book almost a month ago, and I’m sad to say that I had a really difficult time getting into it. It’s sad, because the book is beautifully written. It’s the congruent story of a retired judge in Northern India, his granddaughter, his cook,…

  • In For a Penny, In For a Pound…

    I’m still working on my Book Awards Reading Challenge, which runs from July 2007 through the end of June, 2008, and requires participants to read 12 award winning books in 12 months. In addition, I just joined the Graphic Novels Challenge, and the TBR Challenge. I’m hoping to join a Non Fiction Reading Challenge as well, though that hasn’t been announced yet. So, what the heck, I’ll join one more, the Man Booker Challenge. The rules of this challenge are to read 6 winners of the Man Booker Prize, or books that were short or long listed for the prize, in 2008. OK, I’m in, though for this challenge, I’m…